


The Cider House

by ignipes



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-05
Updated: 2006-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:23:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam wakes up to find himself and a bunch of little kids trapped by a very strange, rather unpleasant old woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cider House

"Hey, mister, you awake?"

He opens his mouth and feels sawdust on tongue, tastes old sugar and rotting wood.

"Can you hear me?"

Head, hands, feet, all present and accounted for. Ribs might be cracked, breathing is just a little tough.

"C'mon, man, you gotta wake up."

He blinks, reaches up with fumbling hands to rub his eyes. His fingers come away damp and sticky, and he feels along the side of his face gingerly until he finds the cut.

"You awake? She'll be back soon. You gotta wake up."

Halloween. Nice sunny day. Walk in the woods, footsteps behind him, branch to the head.

_Shit_.

"Yeah." His voice sounds rough, weak. Sam clears his throat and tries again. "Yeah, I'm awake."

Whispers and murmurs all around, hushed and excited. Not just the one kid, then. Sam pushes himself upright and squints into the shadows. It's not completely dark; lines of gray light slant through cracks in the ceiling, just enough for him to see the metal bars that surround him. _Double shit._

"Hey, you alright?"

"Yeah," he tells them, and he tries to sound like it's the truth. "I'm just fine."

But what he's thinking is: _I fucking hate cages._

-

When they rolled into town yesterday, there were only four kids missing, but there are five locked in with Sam and one more in the old woman's house.

"She wanted Honey to help her with chores," the boy called Gregory explains. Honey is his older sister, aged twelve, and he hasn't seen her in several days.

Kyle, Dylan, Francie, Penny, and Gregory. They tell Sam their names one at a time, small, frightened voices from the shadows. He can't see them clearly, but they confirm that they're all in their own cages.

"We're underground, under the old cider house," Francie explains. She's older than the others -- fourteen, Sam remembers from the newspaper article, disappeared on her way home from swim practice -- and she's trying not to sound scared. "Everybody thinks it's just the foundation left and nothing else, that's why they haven't found us yet."

"How do you know?" Sam asks.

"She told me," Francie says. "She said it's a good place to hide us."

"How often does she come down here?"

None of them uses the old woman's name. That might be important, he thinks, crawling slowly around the perimeter of his cage, feeling for any weakness in the metal. The bars are old, rusted and rough, but strong enough that they barely even tremble when he kicks them. Somebody ought to know her name.

"It depends," Francie tells him. "Sometimes it's just once a day, sometimes more often. She brings food and water, but I think it's drugged."

"When was she down here last?" He doesn't know how long he was out, doesn't even know what time of day it is, if it's even the same day at all. He remembers telling Dean to wait a sec while he checked out the covered well, remembers the smell of crushed apples and the sound of autumn leaves crackling under his feet, a flicker of motion to one side and everything going dark. He doesn't even know if Dean--

Of course Dean is fine. Furious and frightened and tearing up the orchard like a fucking tornado, but fine.

"When she brought you down," Francie says.

"She must be really strong," one of the boys adds. Kyle or Dylan, they're brothers and they sound alike, and it bothers Sam that he can't tell them apart. "We thought she just took kids."

_So did we_, Sam thinks. Strong enough to knock him out and drag him through the orchard and into the cage -- the old woman was racking up points in the "not quite human" column.

"She used to take adults," Gregory says. His cage must be farthest from Sam's because his voice is the softest, but when he speaks all the other kids fall quiet to listen. "Back in the old days."

Francie's voice trembles when she says, "It's not the same thing. You know it can't be the same."

"Same as what?" Sam asks. "What happened in the old days?" He has a sneaking suspicion these are questions he and Dean ought to have asked before they decided to take a walk through the orchard looking for the missing kids.

"Those are just stories," Kyle or Dylan says. "They aren't real."

"Just because they're stories doesn't mean they're not true," Gregory replies.

_Smart kid._ Sam stops feeling along the bars of his cage and sits back, hooks his arms around his knees and exhales slowly. "Hey, Gregory? Can you tell me the stories?"

-

A man came into the town on All Hallows' Eve.

Fifty years ago, one hundred or even two, nobody remembers anymore.

The sun was setting and a man stumbled into town on bare and bloody feet, naked and wretchedly thin and babbling like one possessed. His arms were torn into shreds, his teeth broken out and his mouth bleeding freely. His eyes were wide and he shrieked when the townspeople tried to examine him in the candlelight. They brought him blankets and water, which he threw away in a rage, and they brought the priest to speak to him, to expel the devil that had obviously taken over his soul.

The priest stayed with the man for many hours, praying over him and cleansing his wounds, but the man could not be calmed. His words were nonsense: he spoke of a dark place where men were kept like animals awaiting the slaughter, of rancid smoke that stung his eyes and filled his throat, of creatures with unnatural strength and distant screams, of the men in the dark place vanishing one by one until he was the only one left.

When the man reached this point in his tale, he became calm and he began to smile, his mouth rimmed with blood, frightening the priest with the sudden change.

Through the walls, the man told the priest, that is how he escaped. The walls were soft and they tasted of apple and sugar and spice, the sweetest flavor he had ever known, and like an animal caught in a trap he had gnawed his way out, bite after bite after bite.

-

"It's only a story, that's all." But Francie doesn't sound like she believes it.

"Is she a witch?" Penny, the youngest of the kids, is quietly crying. "Is she going to hurt us?"

Sam wants to reassure her. He wants to tell her not to worry, that there's no such thing as witches, that they'll get out of here and go home to their parents and forget all about it. He wants to tell them that it will be okay.

"Penny," he says, and he tries for _soothing_ but knows that his voice is stuck somewhere around _strained_, "tell me about the old woman. Did you see her when she brought you here?"

He asks each of them in turn, listening to their small voices, their confused stories and growing fear. The old woman tricked each of them, it seems, lured them to her house with requests for help; he was only one lucky enough to get a whack on the head. He needs all the information he can get and he wants to keep the kids talking, though he suspects that six-year-old Penny was right with her first guess. It's not a gingerbread house, but witches are never very good at following the rules.

_Any time now would be a good for a heroic rescue, Dean._

Gregory has been here the longest, with his sister Honey, who the old woman took to the house to do chores many days ago.

_Seriously, man, I'll let you gloat about it for weeks. Months. Just get your ass down here and get us out of these fucking cages._

Sam doesn't tell Gregory that witches never really need young girls to do chores. That's one thing the fairy tales got wrong.

"What if nobody ever finds us?" Kyle or Dylan asks. "What if--"

"Somebody will," Sam says firmly. "My brother is out there looking. He'll find us."

_Any time now._

The kids don't say anything, and Sam knows they don't believe him.

-

The daylight fades from the cracks in the floorboards overhead, and not long after Sam smells the smoke. It's faint at first, he almost thinks he's imagining it, but the scent grows stronger, and his stomach begins to rumble with hunger.

"Somebody's cooking something," Kyle or Dylan says.

"Is it the witch?" the other one asks.

Nobody answers. It's wood-smoke, strong and rich, and it reminds Sam of pyres and graves. He wonders, for a several panicked moments, if this building or another is on fire, but there is no crackling overhead, no light from the flames. It's almost completely dark now, and the temperature is dropping quickly. He can hear somebody's teeth chattering in the shadows. If only they were all in the same cage -- it wouldn't be any better, not really, but at least he could keep the kids warm, huddle them together and hug them close, and all of them would feel less alone.

"Has she lit a fire before?" Sam asks.

"No," Gregory whispers.

Francie clears her throat. "What do you think she's--"

The floorboards creak overhead.

Footsteps, quick and sure, light shoes and somebody who has no need to creep around. _Not Dean._ Sam looks up, squinting in the darkness, and he sees a faint orange glow through the cracks. Dust and dirt fall from the ceiling as the footsteps pass over him; he flinches as it strikes his face.

"It's her," one of the boys whispers. "Oh, no, it's her, she's coming back."

Penny's sniffling grows louder, but nobody hushes her.

Sam is disoriented after so many hours in the dark, but he follows her movements carefully. He guesses that the door to the cider house is just above his cage; that's where she came in. She walks away from him, towards where he thinks Gregory's cage is.

There's a creak of old hinges and a metallic rattle, and a shaft of firelight shines through a sudden hole in the ceiling. Trapdoor. Sam scrambles to his feet -- he has to stoop not to hit his head on the ceiling -- and presses his face against the bars of his cage to see better. The light is faint and flickering, but he can see now two rows of metal cages stretching the length of the room and a makeshift wooden ladder nailed to the wall at the far end.

She climbs down quickly, with the ease of someone who's done it a million times before. She's wearing a long, dark skirt and a high-necked blouse, and her hair is pulled back into a severe bun; she looks like an old-fashioned schoolteacher. When she turns toward the cages, the candlelight illuminates her face: she's not nearly as old as Sam expected, and her expression is handsome and pleasant, her eyes twinkling with amusement.

"Who are you?" Sam calls out to her, letting anger override the fear in his voice, but she doesn't even acknowledge the question.

Walking slowly between the rows of cages, she holds her candle up to each one, even the empty ones, a gentle smile playing on her lips.

"What do you want?" Sam demands. "Who are you?"

She's holding a large metal ring in one hand, swinging the keys idly as she walks. They're fat and clunky, simple enough that the locks would be a breeze to pick if he had any sort of tool at all. Sam stretches through the bars of his cage as she draws nearer, trying to grab her arm, but she dances out of reach and walks by without pausing. She walks the full length of the room, her candlelight giving Sam fleeting glimpses of the children: Francie with her skinny legs and braces, Gregory as a slight shadow at the far end, little Penny's tear-streaked cheeks, Kyle and Dylan in matching red-and-white striped rugby shirts.

"Whatever you want--" _You know it's dangerous to say that to a crazy evil bitch, Sammy._ "Look, you don't need the kids. You have me, I'll stay here--" _Like you have a choice, dude._ "Whatever you want…" _They're only little kids._ "Just tell me who you are. What do you want? What are you doing with us?"

She ignores him completely, finally stopping in front of one of the cages. Kyle or Dylan shrinks away from her, huddling into the corner as she slips a key into the lock. The door swings open and she strides in quickly, reaches down and pulls the boy up by his hair. He thrashes and begs, his cries mingling with those of his brother in the next cage over, and he beats at her with ineffectual fists but she drags him out of the cage easily.

"No!" Sam shakes the door of his own cage, ripping his hands on the rough metal with the effort of trying to pull it open. "Leave him alone! Take me instead!"

She walks by his cage again, pulling the boy by his hair, and Sam's fingers brush over her sleeve as he tries to grab her. This time she stops abruptly and whips her head around to stare at him. Her eyes are round and dark, cold enough to send chills through him.

"Please," he begs, withdrawing his hand slowly. "Don't hurt him. Take me -- I'll do whatever you want."

She smiles and lifts her candle higher, examining Sam's face in the light. "I know you will," she says. "I have other plans for you. But for now, this is the taste I require."

She turns away again, dragging the boy toward the ladder. He struggles and fights, but she has no trouble forcing him through the trapdoor. The candlelight grows dimmer as she climbs, then the trapdoor slams shut and everything is dark. Her footsteps cross the floor overhead, accompanied by the boy's frightened whimpering and the scrape of his feet dragging over the wood. They paused just over Sam's head, and a moment later he heard a door slide shut.

He's suddenly aware of the other boy crying quietly, repeating over and over again: "What's she doing with Kyle? Where's she taking him? What is she doing?"

"Dylan," Sam begins. "Dylan, listen to me--"

Outside, the boy begins to scream, long and piercing and terrified.

"Kyle!" Dylan shrieks. "What is she doing? Kyle!"

Kyle is fighting her, screaming and gasping for breath. _Get away_. Sam's neck hurts from staring upward, his hands ache from gripping the bars. _Get away from her, kid, start running and don't look--_

The screaming ends with an abrupt _thunk_.

For several minutes there is nothing but silence outside and Dylan's quiet, wordless whimpering in the darkness.

Then Sam notices a change in the air. The wood-smoke is different, mingled with something else now, and it takes a few deep breaths for Sam to figure out what it is.

The smell of roasting meat.

Sam swallows down his nausea, closes his eyes, and sinks to the floor, the bars of the cage cold and hard against his back.

-

He has no sense of time passing, but he guesses that it must be around midnight. The witching hour, All Hallows' Eve. The scent of smoke still lingers in the air, but they haven't heard anything for hours.

The kids around him are quiet. They should be at home, pillow cases full of candy by their beds, stupid rubber masks and colorful costumes on the floor. Sam wants to say something to them, something reassuring, but each time he opens his mouth the words are caught in his throat. His hands are rubbed raw and his shoulders ache from the effort of trying to break out of the cage, but he hasn't managed to jostle even one bar loose.

When the cider house door slides open again, one of the kids moans in fear and Sam holds his breath.

Slow, cautious steps. Hesitating right inside the door. _If it's just a foundation overhead, there shouldn't even be a door, or a floor, or--_

Sam looks up, and he sees a pale, steady light through the cracks. Flashlight. A few more steps, heading around the perimeter.

Hope explodes in his chest so suddenly he can barely speak: "Dean?"

The footsteps stop.

"Dean!"

"Sammy?"

Sam scrambles to his feet, nearly knocking his head on the ceiling. "What the hell took you so long?"

"This place is fucking Brigadoon, I swear. Where are you?"

"Below the floor. There's a trapdoor on the other side of the room, across from the door. Should be some keys too."

Dean crosses the room quickly. The keys rattle on their ring, and Dean pulls the trapdoor open and climbs down, skipping the last few rungs of the ladder to jump to the floor. He cast the flashlight beam around, looking into each of the cages as he passed. "Sam…"

"Down here."

"What the hell is it with you and cages?" Dean stops in front of Sam's cage, tucks his shotgun under his arm, and begins trying each of the keys in the lock.

"What the hell is it with you and taking all fucking night to find me?"

Dean looks up, his expression thoughtful. "I'm telling you, this isn't just a regular building. I went through this part of the orchard earlier and didn't see a damn thing."

"What do you mean?"

The lock clicks, and Dean pulls the door open. "I mean just that. This place wasn't here earlier, in the daylight."

"But these kids have been here for days."

"Well, maybe it's hidden somehow. All I know is I couldn't see it until now."

Sam opens his mouth to say more, then stops himself and shakes his head. He reaches for the keys, and Dean hands them over. "We have to get these kids out of here before she comes back."

"Who?"

Sam unlocks Francie's cage first, helps her to her feet. "The witch," he says, glancing over his shoulder at Dean. "The woman who lives in the house."

"Sam, nobody lives here."

"She must've been inside, but she's--"

"Sam, listen to me." Dean looks at Francie shivering in the dim light and shrugs off his jacket to hand to her. "I went through the whole place before I made it to this building. House, barn, shed, everything, none of it was here earlier and there's no sign that anybody's been here for years, maybe decades."

"But we saw her. She--" Sam swallows painfully. "She took one of the kids already. There was a fire…"

"There's an old stone oven out there," Dean says, "but it doesn't look like it's had a fire in it for years."

"She's here." Gregory speaks up suddenly, his voice quiet but firm. "She's always been here."

Dean points the flashlight into Gregory's cage. "Maybe she is, but she sure as hell doesn't _live_ here."

"Do you think--"

"Sam, we'll figure it out later. Let's get the kids out of here, okay?"

They unlock the other cages and help the kids out; Dylan says nothing, barely even glances up at Sam, and Penny obediently takes Francie's hand. Gregory's in the last cage they unlock, and he hesitates before coming out, leaning in the corner and watching with suspicious eyes until Sam extends his hand. Dean goes up the ladder first and the kids follow; Sam goes up last, helping little Penny with each step.

"This is weird," Francie whispers, looking around the room in the glow from Dean's flashlight. "She said -- but this building isn't even here. Not anymore, I mean, it's not supposed to--"

"Well, it is tonight," Dean says. "Come on, let's get--"

He takes three steps before his flashlight starts flickering. He stops abruptly, hand out to keep the others back, and casts the unsteady beam around.

"Dean, look," Sam whispers, pointing toward the door. Red and orange light is glowing outside, and the scent of wood-smoke fills the room.

"It's too late," Gregory says, his voice rising in panic. "She's here."

Dean turns the flashlight off and tucks it into his pocket. "Oh, that's just great. Look, I'll go--"

"But she _promised_!" Before they can stop him, Gregory darts around Dean and runs out the door.

Dean curses and races after him, and Sam follows with the other kids still in a tight, scared cluster around him. Just outside the door of the cider house he stops short.

There is a tall stone oven in the center of the dirt yard that stretches between the cider house and the main house. Every window in the house glows with blinding yellow light, and brilliant flames are billowing out of the opening in the front of the oven. Sam sees Gregory running toward the oven, Dean a few steps behind him, but he doesn't see the woman until it's too late to shout a warning.

She materializes directly in front of Dean, flickering from a mere shadow to a solid form in a matter of seconds. She looks different, younger and prettier, but she's wearing the same plain clothes. The firelight seems to shine through her skin, and her eyes are white-hot with fury.

"Stay back!" Sam orders Francie and the others, sprinting toward the oven.

Dean stops short and swings his shotgun up, but he's too slow and the woman leaps at him, grabs his arm and swings him around, flinging the shotgun aside and dragging him toward the oven. Dean is kicking and shouting, clawing at her with his free arm, but he can't get free.

Sam lunges at them when he's close enough, but she lashes out with her other hand and shoves him away easily. He stumbles backward and falls, and his head hits the ground hard enough to daze him for a few seconds.

When he struggles upright again, the woman is standing just before the door of the oven, one hand still gripping Dean's arm. Gregory is hanging on her other arm, tugging and pleading in a high, frantic voice: "You promised! You promised you wouldn't anymore! You have to stop!"

"Be quiet," the woman snaps. She tries to shake him free but he holds tight. "Go inside," she says, snarling hideously in the firelight. "This isn't your concern."

"You promised!" he says again. There are tears streaming down his face. "You promised you--"

The woman releases Dean's arm and twists to slap Gregory, but he dodges out of the way and she stumbles awkwardly. He lets go of her arm and ducks to one side, then turns with both hands outstretched and shoves her, hard, toward the oven.

For a moment there is a look of pure shock on her face, and she loses her balance, tumbles backward over the sill of the oven door and into the flames. Her screams mingle with Gregory's frantic shouts as he tries to tug her out by the legs and the flames in the oven grow stronger, whipping out of the opening and the top of the chimney. The stones begin to glow red, cracking and groaning from the heat, and the air around the chimney shimmers.

"Dean, get away from there!" Sam shouts.

Dean is already rolling away from the oven, and Sam barely has time to take two steps toward him with the oven flares with blinding light and the woman's screams grow even louder. Sam throws his arms up and lowers his head just as the stones shatter. He feels and sees a rain of red-hot chunks of stone and mortar falling all around, but it fades quickly, far too quickly, and darkness falls like a shroud over the clearing.

Lowering his arms cautiously, Sam stares as the oven, the cider house, the house and barn, everything in the clearing crumbles to dust, black and silent and swift, and there is nothing left except for Gregory, a tiny figure in the center, frozen with his arms outstretched and his face twisted with horror.

"You _promised_," he whispers, and he begins to crumble as well, his skin shifting from pale to black, his hands falling away and his edges blurring until he collapses into a pile of fine ash on the ground.

The clearing is empty, and there is no light except for the moon overhead.

"Dean!" Sam runs over and falls to his knees beside Dean, brushes dust and ash from his jacket and helps him upright. "Are you okay?"

Dean coughs and sits up, cradling his arm to his chest. "The kids?"

Sam looks around quickly; the other three kids are huddled at the edge of the clearing. "They're fine. Are you--"

"Yeah, fine. A little singed, but -- seriously, Sam, what the _fuck_ just happened?"

Sam shakes his head. "I have no idea."

-

The librarian is taking down the Halloween decorations. Cut-out pumpkins, black paper bats, pointy little witches' hats taped to the window. Past her, past the fingerprint-smudged glass, the day is a gray as steel and a few lazy snowflakes are spiraling down, as though the sky can't decide if it wants to snow or not. Elsewhere in the library somebody is holding storytime, but the sound of little kids' laughter and chatter sounds distant and muffled.

"Hey."

Sam jumps, startled, and accidentally knocks the folded newspaper off his lap. He reaches down to pick it up and replies, "Hey. Find anything?"

Dean sits down across from him. His sleeves are rolled up and the deep, livid bruises on his arm are visible; it looks more like he was run over by a truck than merely grabbed by a ghost. "Yeah, I think so. Guess there's a lot of local history buffs in town, so this stuff wasn't hard to dig up."

"What'd you find?" Sam almost doesn't want to ask. The front page headline of the paper claims that Kyle's funeral is today, and there's a full-color picture of his parents and his brother -- they were twins, it turns out -- crying in a huddle. They didn't find much of the body, just a few charred bones and, inexplicably, scraps of the red-and-white shirt he had been wearing. The official story is that the investigation is ongoing, but town sheriff is Francie's father and Sam knows that, unofficially, nobody expects to find anything. He and Dean are lucky, he thinks, that they were nowhere near the town when the kids first disappeared and can't reasonably be blamed.

"Earth to Sammy--"

He looks up from the paper. "Yeah, sorry. So what did you find?"

"You alright, man?"

"Yeah."

Dean doesn't look like he believes him, but he shrugs and starts reading from his notes, tapping his pen idly on the page. "Hannah and Gregory Grimes, sister and brother, inherited the orchard and the rest of the property when their father and stepmother died suddenly in 1801." He flips a page or two and chews on the end of his pen for a second. "Looks like they lived quietly for a few years, or at least quietly enough that nobody suspected them of anything."

"Like what?" Sam asks, though he has a pretty good guess.

"Well," Dean goes on, "there aren't many records from the time, but the town priest kept a diary of all the juicy gossip, like any man of the cloth would, and it seems like there were quite a few mysterious disappearances from town around that time. People just blamed them on animals or Indians or whatever, and nobody seems to think much of it."

"So what happened?"

"The gossipy priest didn't know for sure, but it looks like one day pretty little Hannah had an accident and ended up falling into her own fire."

Sam thinks about the woman's terrified expression as she fell into the flames and shudders. "Guess it wasn't really an accident. So Gregory inherited the property after that?"

"Not quite." Dean shakes his head. "Hannah didn't die, though the opinion around town seem to be that it was shame. Apparently she was a real beauty before -- and man, I sure hope this priest atoned for his impure thoughts before he died, 'cause his diary reads like softcore porn -- 'skin like the purest ivory and hair the color of honey'--"

"Honey. That's what he called her. Gregory, I mean."

"Yeah, well, she survived, but she was horribly scarred, and that's when it got even weirder. People said she was interested in witchcraft, that she had learned it from her stepmother when she was alive."

"Help with the chores," Sam mutters.

Dean glances at him, but goes on, "Sounds like she became obsessed with finding away to get rid of her scars, supposedly cursing any man who so much as looked at her funny. The priest says that folks were still gossiping, because people were still disappearing and they started wondering things like why she had a smokehouse for meat when she didn't have any animals."

Sam takes a deep breath, fighting down nausea. "I think I can guess."

"Then," Dean pauses, giving Sam a significant look, "our boy Gregory, all grown up, shows up in town raving like a madman a few years down the line."

"The story he told me," Sam says. "That was his own story."

"Looks like. The priest couldn't make heads or tails of it, but it sounds like she kept him prisoner just like the other people she grabbed, and he tried to stop her but she never listened. Gregory died before long, and when the townspeople went out to talk to Hannah, they discovered that she was dead, too, killed in the cider house."

"He killed her."

Dean nods. "That's my guess. Broke free and killed her."

"Did they find the room under the cider house?"

Dean shakes his head. "No. The whole property burnt to the ground later, but I'm thinking her spirit was already hiding her secret room by then. She spent her whole life hiding it, even before she was burned, so it fits that after she was killed she would do the same."

"So what was she doing while she was alive?" Sam asks, frowning. "Pulling an Elizabeth Bathory and--" He thinks of the smell of wood-smoke and roasting meat, of her sly smile and _this is the taste I require_, and he shudders. "--and killing and… _eating_ people for her beauty?"

"She wouldn't be the first person to use black magic like that, or to try." Dean hasn't even made any jokes about sticking to salads from now on, Sam realizes, and he doesn't know if he should be annoyed or grateful.

"But why now? Why does her spirit suddenly appear now? She's been dead for, what, almost two hundred years?"

Dean quirks an eyebrow. "Exactly two hundred years. The priest wrote that she was found dead in her cider house on All Souls' Day, 1807. And get this -- Halloween, 1907, exactly one hundred years ago, four teenage boys went missing from town. Everyone assumed they just ran away to, I dunno, go work on the railroad or something, but…"

"Every hundred years."

"Looks like it. I told you, it's frickin' Brigadoon, except without all the singing and dancing."

"I'm not even going to ask how much you know about the singing and dancing in Brigadoon."

Dean waves his hand dismissively. "Whatever. Look, she returns, maybe for a few days, the burned-down buildings show up -- only at night, I guess -- and kids vanish."

"So she won't be back for another century."

Dean smiles crookedly. "C'mon, Sammy, we can do better than that. She won't be back at all, and neither will little Gregory. They were both laid to rest in the old town cemetery, with proper Christian burials and everything."

"Oh." Sam feels a little stupid, but he only nods. "Right. Tonight?"

"You know grave-digging is my favorite way to spend a night on the town."

"Yeah." Sam stared out the window, telling himself that it's not really cold in the library. He wishes it would just snow already and get over the steely-gray New England weather crap outside. "Mine too."

"Sammy."

Sam looks at Dean.

"Sam, you couldn't have done anything else."

He shrugs and says, "We should get some--"

"Dude, listen to me. You were trapped in a fucking cage by a crazy ghost. There was nothing you could do."

Sam shrugs again. That fact that it's true doesn't make it any easier, but Dean knows that better than anyone, so he only agrees, "Yeah, I know."

"Right." Dean stands up. "Let's go grab something to eat and a few hours sleep before dark."

"Sure, but--"

"Don't worry." Dean smirks and smacks Sam softly on the arm. "I'll order vegetarian, just for you."

Sam rolls his eyes and follows Dean out of the library.


End file.
